"Given that the Kerry convention featured a skipper brave and sure, a first mate who makes others comfortable, a millionaire called "Lovey" by her spouse, two pretty young Kerry castaways and a movie star (the ubiquitously annoying Ben Affleck), I suppose we should be grateful that Camp Kerry didn't introduce the nominee with the "Gilligan's Island" theme song."

"Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip."

"At least Teresa Heinz Kerry kept her subliminal message simple: She wore a ketchup-red suit to introduce the second senator in her life.

"Her husband, as usual, went overboard. The Democratic convention, which was focus-group-dial-a-metered to death, needed a dose of dramamine."

Friday, July 30, 2004

“While we honor John Kerry’s service in Vietnam for a couple months, we totally abhor the lies (Kerry) told the country about us being war criminals while he admitted being a war criminal.”

Basically, the Democrat “Emperor has no clothes.” His entire campaign revolves about a few months in Vietnam decades ago; the circumstances of which are contradicted by most of us who were there and knew him.

The MBTA quietly provided special Orange Line trains for people exiting the FleetCenter on all four nights of the Democratic National Convention, opening the otherwise closed North Station so that some 3,200 delegates, journalists, and others with convention credentials could be whisked to Back Bay Station, free of charge.

Word of the special service did not sit well with T riders who have had to put up with baggage inspections and forced transfers to shuttle buses.

''It seems like they've overlooked the people of Boston and regular commuters," said Susan McLay, 23, of Billerica, who takes commuter rail and the Orange Line to the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute of Health Professions in Charlestown. North Station has been closed to everyone but the conventioneers, she said, which has caused major disruptions in daily routines.

''That doesn't smell very good to me," said Julianne Ture, an Orange Line rider who took the week off. ''The whole convention has been such a fiasco."

"He ends on the biggest whopper of the evening: "Elsewhere, North Korea's nuclear menace, a threat far more real and immediate than any posed by Saddam Hussein, has been allowed to advance unheeded." Does anyone remember who brokered the 1994 deal in which the Clinton administration agreed to provided food and oil to North Korea, in exchange for its promise not to develop nuclear weapons-a promise the North Koreans promptly broke, allowing them to threaten us with a nuclear bomb today? That's right: it was Jimmy Carter. This is the same psychological projection Carter employed in 1979. Back then, he suffered a crisis of confidence that left him paralyzed before the fateful challenges of the day-yet he projected his malaise onto the America people."

In Boston, Mr. Clinton argued against so-called tax cuts for the rich that leave "ordinary citizens to fend for themselves." He added "the only test that matters is whether people were better off when we finished than when we started." But when Mr. Clinton first sat in the Oval Office in 1993, he inherited a strong economic recovery from Papa Bush, with real economic growth registering a 4.1 percent gain. When George W. Bush inherited the economy from Mr. Clinton, the U.S. was dropping into recession.

For Mr. Clinton to blame Mr. Bush for cutting taxes on rich people is just plain silly. It was Mr. Clinton who signed a huge capital-gains tax cut for stocks and residential real estate in 1997.

He also asked people to judge him by his record. How about judging him by his Senate voting record, the most liberal voting record in the United States Senate. This supposedly patriotic Democrat voted for the nuclear freeze, to cut the intelligence budget and also voted against the $87 billion in funding for American troops. Maybe we can judge him by his record of missing 29 out of 38 meetings of that intelligence committee he served on in the Senate. Maybe we can judge him on his record of 20 years in the U.S. Senate without a noteworthy legislative accomp0lishment.

Some of it was so pompous and self-congratulatory I almost gagged. Can you believe he said this:

I was born in Colorado, in Fitzsimmons Army Hospital, when my dad was a pilot in World War II. Now, I'm not one to read into things, but guess which wing of the hospital the maternity ward was in? I'm not making this up. I was born in the West Wing!

One thought sprang into my mind immediately: what an arrogant jerk.

No mention of democracy in Iraq or Afghanistan. No mention of the terrorist forces that are amassed there. No reference to the elections scheduled for January.

I definitely liked Kerry less at the end of it than at the beginning. To me at least, he is a deeply unlikable guy: arrogant, dull, pompous, mannered, self-righteous. I suspect that the more he is front and center the more this will count against him.

Allow us to recall a few of the missing details amid this nostalgia trip, starting with the fact that the Clinton years began by inheriting a recovery that was finally gathering steam. The economy grew by more than 4% in 1992, including 4.5% in the fourth quarter, too late to re-elect George H.W. Bush but enough to give the Clinton era a running start.

Mr. Clinton did pass a tax increase in the summer of 1993, but only after Senate Democrats stripped out his new BTU tax and Senate Republicans killed his spending "stimulus." The expansion stumbled in early 1993, no doubt partly on tax-hike uncertainty, then revived late in the year. In 1994 stock markets were flat but interest rates actually rose throughout the year, peaking on the very day in 1994 that Republicans took Congress. That turned out to be the real start of the 1990s boom.

Then the bubble burst--not in 2001, but starting in 2000. The tech-heavy Nasdaq peaked in March of Bill Clinton's final year in office. The National Bureau of Economic Research now says the economy shrank by 0.5% in the third quarter of 2000--albeit too late for voters to feel it that November. After a fourth quarter blip in growth, the economy slipped into recession by the formal definition (at least two consecutive quarters of declining GDP) in the first half of 2001.

In other words, the "Bush recession" began for all practical purposes on Mr. Clinton's watch. The spectacular popping of the dot-com bubble also meant that at least some of the wealth created in the late 1990s had been an illusion. While productivity gains and much of the growth were real, the over-investment in telecom and other areas was so great that it has taken years to recover.

As we later learned, the corporate scandals that burst into public view in late 2001 also began in the 1990s. Set aside who and what caused them, this timing meant that the Bush Administration had to clean up after the scandals, and the regulatory costs associated with that cleanup (Sarbanes-Oxley, etc.) caused a further delay in the recovery of business confidence and spending.

Congress is moving closer to approving Maryland and Constitution avenues NE as site of the Victims of Communism Memorial to remember a death toll from Berlin to Beijing, Hanoi to Havana, that was greater than all of the wars of the 20th century combined. The memorial will feature a replica of the Goddess of Democracy statue, as well as an eternal flame and bronze panels with quotes from heroes of the Cold War. The proposed site, recommended by the National Park Service and part of the master plan for memorials in Washington, is one block from the U.S. Capitol and would be directly across the street from the Veterans of Foreign Wars headquarters, whose members fought against communism on several fronts.

Wednesday, July 28, 2004

SEN. JOHN KERRY: "[I]t is something that we know-for instance, Saddam Hussein has used weapons of mass destruction against his own people, and there is some evidence of their efforts to try to secure these kinds of weapons and even test them." (CBS’ "Face The Nation," 9/23/01)

KERRY: "He is and has acted like a terrorist, and he has engaged in activities that are unacceptable." (Fox News’ "The O’Reilly Factor," 12/11/01)

KERRY: "I think we clearly have to keep the pressure on terrorism globally. This doesn’t end with Afghanistan by any imagination. And I think the president has made that clear. I think we have made that clear. Terrorism is a global menace. It’s a scourge. And it is absolutely vital that we continue, for instance, Saddam Hussein." (CNN’s "Larry King Live," 12/14/01)

MSNBC’S CHRIS MATTHEWS: "Do you think that the problem we have with Iraq is real and it can be reduced to a diplomatic problem? Can-can we get this guy to accept inspections of those weapons of mass destruction potentially and get past a possible war with him?" (MSNBC’s "Hardball," 2/5/02)

KERRY: "Outside chance, Chris. Could it be done? The answer is yes. But he would view himself only as buying time and playing a game, in my judgment. Do we have to go through that process? The answer is yes. We’re precisely doing that. And I think that’s what Colin Powell did today." (MSNBC’s "Hardball," 2/5/02)

KERRY: "I would disagree with John McCain that it’s the actual weapons of mass destruction he may use against us, it’s what he may do in another invasion of Kuwait or in a miscalculation about the Kurds or a miscalculation about Iran or particularly Israel. Those are the things that - that I think present the greatest danger. He may even miscalculate and slide these weapons off to terrorist groups to invite them to be a surrogate to use them against the United States. It’s the miscalculation that poses the greatest threat." (CBS’ "Face The Nation," 9/15/02)

KERRY: "George, I said at the time I would have preferred if we had given diplomacy a greater opportunity, but I think it was the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein, and when the President made the decision, I supported him, and I support the fact that we did disarm him." (ABC News, Democrat Presidential Candidate Debate, Columbia, SC, 5/3/03)

SEN. JOE LIEBERMAN (D-CT): "[B]oth have sent an uncertain message, one in principled opposition to the war, Governor Dean. The other [Senator Kerry] an ambivalence about the war, which does not - will not give the people confidence about our party’s willingness to make the tough decisions to protect their security in a world after September 11." (ABC News, Democrat Presidential Candidate Debate, Columbia, SC, 5/3/03)

KERRY: "I voted to threaten the use of force to make Saddam Hussein comply with the resolutions of the United Nations." (Sen. John Kerry, Remarks At Announcement Of Candidacy, Patriot’s Point, SC, 9/2/03)

KERRY: "[H]e can rebuild both chemical and biological. And every indication is, because of his deception and duplicity in the past, he will seek to do that. So we will not eliminate the problem for ourselves or for the rest of the world with a bombing attack." (ABC’s "This Week," 2/22/98)

KERRY: "I am way ahead of the commander in chief, and I’m probably way ahead of my colleagues and certainly of much of the country. But I believe this. I believe that he has used these weapons before. He has invaded another country. He views himself as a modern-day Nebuchadnezzar. He wants to continue to play the uniting critical role in that part of the world. And I think we have to stand up to that." (ABC’s "This Week," 2/22/98)

Before is before we found out Joe Wilson lied through his teeth.Note that, half of his appearances in the Post and LA Times were the op-eds he wrote to justify himself and blame the fact that more or less everything he said last year turned out to be a lie on a "Republican smear campaign."

Democratic activist, member of the mainstream media -- what's the difference? "Let's talk a little media bias here. The media, I think, wants Kerry to win." Evan Thomas set the stage for this whole election, I think. But if Kerry's already enjoying the 15-point media-induced edge that Thomas predicted, then he's running a really weak campaign. . . .

For a convention touted to bring money to the small business of Boston, limiting attendees' access to purchase water, soda, and other refreshments from area stores and funneling money to the convention's large-scale vendors turns a buck for insiders at the expense of the local shopkeeper.

Ronstadt threw into a discussion of her music and life that she wanted to "impeach Bush," but what was more interesting was that she said that she had moved her children back from liberal Los Angeles to conservative Tucson (where she grew up) because she didn't want them exposed to all those drugs in LA. She complained about the conservatives in Tucson, yet, to protect her children, she moved them there. It doesn't enter this airhead's mind that everyone else wants their kids to grow up in a decent, respectfull, place as well. It is like Sharon Stone throwing away her guns - while keeping her armed bodyguards and other such liberal hypocrisies.

Michael Reagan on his younger brother, Ron Reagan speaking at the DNC. The following is from a radio interview with the elder Mr. Reagan, broadcast this week on "Newsbeat" with Blanquita Cullum.

Q: So tell me what's with your brother? Why is your brother, Ron, going over and speaking at the Democratic convention? He's an angry guy. A: Because he wasn't invited by Ralph Nader. Q: Oh yeah, very interesting. A: I mean that's a reality. I think he voted for Ralph Nader last time around. Q: But you said he never voted for your dad. A: No, you know, that's why [my late sister] Maureen and I were put on a plane to cancel out his vote and [my sister] Patti Davis' vote. I mean they never have been supportive of my dad's policies ... I mean remember during the '80s? Q: Oh, I do. A: He was demonstrating against him and doing all this other stuff and — Q: And Patti was in Playboy. A: — and so on. I mean the Playboy thing was upsetting to the family, uh, needless to say. It's not something I think a parent wants to see their children get involved in. But they've always been kind of the rebels, raised in the 1960s and you love 'em to death. But what bothers me most about this ... if they want to vote for, you know, [Sen. John] Kerry, or if they want to vote for Ralph Nader or whatever, the reality is that we are blessed with a good name. We are really blessed to have a great name. And does it open doors? Absolutely, it opens doors. I mean it opened the Democratic convention doors for my brother, Ron. Q: Right. A: He hasn't accomplished anything politically ... to speak at that convention. They are going to use him on this whole "stem cell" thing he knows nothing about. I'm the only Reagan that sits on a board of directors of an Alzheimer's unit that deals with all this stuff on a regular basis. I did all the research — he has no idea what he is talking about. And it is always the politics of feelings. But he is there because he has a great name. His name is Reagan.

I had a great vacation. I'll post a link to pictures when I get them online.

Thanks to Leslie for keeping things rolling while I was in Yosemite.Great post about the Boston Pizzeria!The DNC is going to cost the city & Commonwealth over $12 Million!That's money stolen out of the taxpayers pockets while the democrats bring the city to a standstill, disrupt thousands, and try to close down local business. Hmmm...sounds like a typical day with democrats!

"That's an insult to the auto worker, it's an insult to the American worker, it's an insult to mainstream America," said Sam Burwell from Corunna, Mich., a third-generation auto worker for General Motors. "It also shows who [liberal democrat John Kerry] really in touch with: his European, elitistFrench friends and not Americans like me. A Rolls-Royce, for cryin' out loud."

Saturday, July 24, 2004

English person was asking me how come Austin is so crime-free and safe for kids compared to the UK?

"Well, over there," said I, "if someone breaks into your house in the night and tries to burgle you, you can shoot him. You can even kill him, and you won't get arrested. If someone mugs you, you can shoot them too. So that must put quite a few criminals off."

"My personal credo as a libertarian conservative: I think all attempts to reform your fellow-citizens or tell them how to live their lives are arrogant and tyrannical. THAT'S why I oppose Leftism. I want people to be free to manage their own lives. "Reform" is just authoritarianism. People are not playthings for anybody's theories or obsessions."

Monday, July 19, 2004

Our military showed overwhelming competence and strength during the invasion of Iraq--not to mention the eventual capture of Saddam Hussein himself last year. Don’t forget that. There's still an opportunity in Iraq to establish a pro-American beachhead in the midst of some of the greatest irrationality and potential dangers the world has ever known: none the least of which, Iran, still the world's number one sponsor of terrorism. Simply put, it’s better to have an American-supported government watching over Iran than not. Terrorists recognize this fact, which is why they are relentlessly attacking our troops in Iraq. They understand the stakes, even though a majority of Americans (currently preparing to vote pacifist John Kerry into office) no longer seem to grasp them.

Dr. Hurd also has a suggestion for us:

Those of us who are criticizing President Bush for the right reasons—for being too weak, not for being too strong—should (a) continue to do so; and (b) be prepared to support him, or somebody else in the future to unequivocally smash our enemies so the rest of us can continue to live in peace and freedom.

Massachusetts liberal democrat Senator John Kerry was demanding to know yesterday whether President Bush read the full National Intelligence Assessment (NIE) prepared in October 2002. Now we find out that he didn't bother to read it himself before voting in favour of the Use of Force Authorization.

I guess he was too busy. Since he didn't think his vote mattered - because, as he put it, "the president had the authority" to go into Iraq without it - reading the NIE probably wasn't worth his time. Or maybe he just had a fundraiser to attend or something.

"MICHAELMoore messed with the wrong rocker when he charged that The Who's Pete Townshend refused to allow his classic hit "Won't Get Fooled Again" to be used in "Fahrenheit9/11." Biting back on his Web site, Townshend said the reason the song wasn't used was not because he was for the war in Iraq (which he admits he was), but because he doesn't trust Moore's accuracy in reporting and regards Moore as a bully. "

"I greatly resent being bullied and slurred by him in interviews just because he didn't get what he wanted from me. It seems to me that this aspect of his nature is not unlike that of the powerful and willful man at the center of his new documentary

That is what the mother of the late Major Gregory Stone, US Air Force, calls MichaelMoore.Major Stone was killed by Hasan K. Akbar and footage of his Arlington National Cemetery was included in Fahrenhate911. According to the Washington Times, the family does not know how Mr. Moore obtained the video, and a family representative said they did not give permission and are considering legal recourse.

The message of this film is very weak and propagandistic ... We were used to such messages in the communist days. Everybody has open eyes and can understand that this is propaganda. It was a weak film that tells us nothing new.

I read with some dismay the text of your letter asking the United Nations to send election observers to the presidential election this year. This call for observers comes, despite the existence within the United States of effective judicial resolution of disputes. This mechanism, known as "litigation," allows for the redress of grievances within the legal system. The fact of your party's failure to win the White House in 2000 does not point to a defect in the electoral process, but is perhaps probative in the defects of your party's tactics.

As a result, I find it personally embarrassing and insulting that elected representatives of my nation feel the need to seek recourse to an ineffective, corruption-riddled multinational organization, rather than trusting in legal mechanisms that have ensured orderly succession of executive power within this country for over 200 years. After all, the United States is hardly East Timor.

The report also said Wilson provided misleading information to The Washington Post last June. He said then that he concluded the Niger intelligence was based on documents that had clearly been forged because "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong." "Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the 'dates were wrong and the names were wrong' when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports," the Senate panel said. Wilson told the panel he may have been confused and may have "misspoken" to reporters. The documents -- purported sales agreements between Niger and Iraq -- were not in U.S. hands until eight months after Wilson made his trip to Niger.

Let’s follow the history. First, Kerry and the Dems said that we were in a Recession. Indeed we had been, but the American economy hasn’t been in a recession for a couple of years now.

When the economic stats became overwhelming, Kerry and the Dems began telling us that it was a “jobless recovery.” Even though employment is always the last economic metric to respond in a recovery (and the last to respond in a recession), they insisted on claiming that this was somehow abnormal.

Now that the employment numbers are rebounding, John Kerry and the Dems are going to try to sell us the line that the jobs are “not good jobs.” Essentially, they want us to believe that even though the economy has rebounded and is creating a ton of jobs, that the jobs are all crappy jobs that people don’t want to work.

The first thing that I want to point out is how condescending that attitude is. That McDonald’s job that pays $6 an hour may not be a “good job” to multi-millionaire John Kerry, but for the kid with no skills who needs gas money, it’s a great job. The fact is that not every job can pay $100,000 a year. The other fact is that not everyone is qualified to work the jobs that do pay $100,000 a year. This is that limousine liberal attitude of “I’ll decide what’s best for you because you’re too stupid to know better” showing through.

Intelligence failures are not the same thing as lies. And intelligence failures about Iraqi WMD did not begin with the Bush administration. It is worth recalling that the CIA was way off the mark in its estimates of Saddam's chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs before the first Iraq war, too. It turned out then that Saddam was a much more dangerous WMD menace than the experts had realized. The experts then underestimated the threat. This time around, they may have overestimated the threat. But if intelligence mistakes are inevitable, is it better to worry too much about potential threats or to worry too little? Worrying too much -- if that's what happened -- resulted in the toppling of one of the planet's most murderous tyrants. Worrying too little resulted in 9/11.

Kerry can only paint the dark and dreary picture he desperately needs to convince the electorate is real by cherry picking the data.

As we all know, this is hardly the first time Kerry has had to resort to highly selective statistical legerdemain to further his cause. One does well to take all statistical claims with a grain of salt, of course. But when they come from the Kerry campaign, one would do well to have a salt lick handy.

From the Jerusalem Post: "It would be 'catastrophic' for the Middle East if Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry was elected to the White House, a former Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington said in comments published Wednesday.Read more.

DARFUR UPDATE: Here's a page from Human Rights Watch, saying that France -- last seen trying to block U.S.-initiated sanctions against the genocidal Sudanese government -- holds perhaps the largest oil concession in Sudan: "the concession, by far the largest in the south at 120,000 square kilometers, is owned by the oil multinational TotalFinaElf, and encompasses Central Upper Nile and beyond." Screw 'em -- I say no blood for oil!

A UK government inquiry into the intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq is expected to conclude that Britain's spies were correct to say that Saddam Hussein's regime sought to buy uranium from Niger.

The inquiry by Lord Butler, which was delivered to the printers on Wednesday and is expected to be released on July 14, has examined the intelligence that underpinned the UK government's claims about the threat from Iraq. . . .

The Financial Times revealed last week that a key part of the UK's intelligence on the uranium came from a European intelligence service that undertook a three-year surveillance of an alleged clandestine uranium-smuggling operation of which Iraq was a part.

Intelligence officials have now confirmed that the results of this operation formed an important part of the conclusions of British intelligence. The same information was passed to the US but US officials did not incorporate it in their assessment.

Tuesday, July 06, 2004

"It's a violation of my First Amendment rights that I cannot advertise my movie. It's a movie," said Moore. "I have not publicly endorsed John Kerry. I am an independent; I am not a member of the Democratic Party."

New York City Board of Elections records show that Moore, 50, registered to vote in Gotham in 1992, checking off "Democratic" as his party affiliation (below you'll find a copy of his original registration form). He listed his address as the swanky Upper West Side building where he owns a multimillion dollar condominium (Moore's office is on West 57th Street). The filmmaker's New York registration remains active, though he has not voted since an October 2001 Democratic runoff election.

Now here's the good part: Moore is simultaneously registered to vote in Michigan, where registrants aren't even given the option of party affiliation (so he's not an Independent there either). According to Antrim County records, Moore registered last April from his lakefront spread in northern Michigan, where he reportedly splits his time, but has yet to vote in Michigan. He transferred his drivers license to Michigan from New York around the same time, though Moore has a Volkswagen Beetle registered from his Manhattan home.

Hama Kerim, a 51-year-old notary in this town where Saddam Hussein gassed 5,000 Kurds to death in 1988, describes seeing the deposed dictator in a courtroom last week as the second-best day of his life.

"Nothing can beat the sight of Saddam being dragged out of his hole by U.S. troops" in December, he said in an interview yesterday.

And John "By the Way I Served in Vietnam" Kerry claims that the economy sucks and all the new jobs are low-wage. Looks like the DNC is hiring, and at $7.50-$12.50/hr. That's not minimum wage for what must be an entry-level position for, shall we say, unskilled labor?

As Jeff pointed out, the really interesting point is that the ad says the job is to "defeat Bush" - not "elect Kerry."

As early as 1994 [...] Osama bin Laden had expressed a willingness to work with Saddam Hussein. It was the Iraqis, per the 9/11 Commission report, who were reluctant to work with al Qaeda.

But were they?

According to numerous intelligence reports dating back to the Clinton administration, Iraq provided chemical weapons training (and perhaps materials) to the Sudanese government-run Military Industrial Corporation--which, along with Sudanese intelligence, also had a close relationship with al Qaeda. (Jamal Ahmed Al-Fadl and Ali A. Mohamed, two high-ranking al Qaeda terrorists who cooperated with U.S. authorities before 9/11, said Sudanese intelligence and military officials provided security for al Qaeda safehouses and training camps, and al Qaeda operatives did the same for Sudanese government facilities.)

William Cohen, secretary of defense under Clinton, testified to this before the September 11 Commission on March 23, 2004. Cohen was asked about U.S. attacks on a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory on August 20, 1998. The strikes came 13 days after al Qaeda terrorists bombed U.S. embassies in East Africa, killing some 257 people (including 12 Americans) and injuring more than 5,000. The Clinton administration and the intelligence community quickly determined that al Qaeda was behind the attacks and struck back at the facility in Sudan and at an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. Almost immediately, the decision to attack the plant outside Khartoum was controversial. The Clinton administration, in its efforts to justify the strikes, told reporters that the plant had strong links to Iraq's chemical weapons program. No fewer than six top Clinton administration officials--on the record--cited the Iraq connection to justify its strikes in response to the al Qaeda attacks on the U.S. embassies. (Some of these officials, like James Rubin and Sandy Berger, now hold top advisory positions in John Kerry's presidential campaign. Kerry, however, now says he was misled about an Iraq-al Qaeda relationship.)

The biggest lie in Fahrenheit 9/11 is the picture of pre-war Iraq. MichaelMoore shows a happy collage of smiling Iraqis in a beautifully tranquil country -- a kid getting his hair cut in a barber shop, a couple getting married, children flying kites. There's no picture of a gassed Kurd, no picture of the acid baths or eye gouging in Saddam's torture chambers, no picture of anyone being slowly lowered into an industrial shredder, no picture of Iraqi troops tossing premature babies out of incubators in Kuwait, no hint of why millions of Iraqis fled their homeland after Saddam came to power, no picture of how hard it is to fly a kite without hands.

Monday, July 05, 2004

Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights.

In Mr Bradbury's classic, the government controls the population by banning books (451 Fahrenheit is the temperature in which paper burns). They are not to think for themselves. They are to take the government video propaganda for the truth.

"We have written in these pages that the mainstreaming of Al Sharpton is complete. Well, now it's really complete," National Review says in an editorial. "Sharpton is stumping with John Kerry and he is 'going to campaign with me from now until Election Day' — that's what Kerry said. Kerry also said, 'During the primaries, there was one person who consistently was always there, keeping the peace and the compass going in the right direction. And that was Rev. Al Sharpton.' "Forgotten is the Tawana Brawley hoax, in which Sharpton accused an assistant district attorney named StevenPagones of raping and mutilating that girl. (No one had.) Sharpton proudly refuses to apologize for his defamation. Forgotten is Freddy's Fashion Mart, the incident in which Sharpton merely incited a mob to murder. (Seven people died; Sharpton had denounced 'white interlopers' in Harlem.) Forgotten is all the other race-baiting, all the poison that Sharpton has emitted in the course of his glorious career. The press turns away; the Democratic Party turns away, and embraces. "It says something unpleasant about America that one of our major presidential nominees could link arms with such a man — and suffer no penalty whatsoever. No, the Democrats have decided that Sharpton is an asset. And the horrible truth is that they're probably right."

Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights.

The authors say they expected to find that the mainstream media leaned to the left, but they were "astounded by the degree." So when people say, for example, that The New York Times may be tilted left, but people can compensate for that by watching Fox News, they don't take into account that the Times is much further from the center than Fox. "To gain a balanced perspective, one would need to spend twice as much time watching Special Report as he or she spends reading The New York Times." . . .

"I bought your book yesterday. I went to...86th and Lexington in New York City. They had it buried in the back with older Current Event Books, not with the Newly released books. It was hard to find, but I am glad I found it."

"Seem to be some, well, obstructionism by store staff. Report from Tucson that person called store, was told they didn't stock it, wouldhave to be special ordered, would take eight days. Person went to store and found large quanities on shelf."

I first tried to purchase it from a [bookstore], but could not find the book anywhere. When I did find it...it was deeply tucked (read: hidden) away in the "Politics & Government" section of the store. I found it quite interesting, though, that both stores had full-out displays of anti-Bush books near the entrances (complete with signs that labeled the selections as "U.S. & World Affairs"). Coincidence? I think not.

"I'm a graduate student at Louisiana State University and have recently become very interested in Michael Moore. At [a] bookstore, I looked for your new book in the likely places and found nothing. Then I decided to seek assistance from the clerks. Despite the bookstore having a politics and current events section and a new non-fiction section (which has soft cover copies of Stupid White Men that are also featured as National Campus Best Sellers), and despite the very high publicity currently surrounding Michael Moore's activities, I'm sorry to report that your book was shelved with the apparently non-current political books. Even here, only the spines were displayed."

"Bravo to this web site which I found while reading your new book on Moore. I had a similar experience at [a national bookstore] in Fort Lee, NJ. I looked everywhere in the new releases section until finally I asked (the woman thought I wanted a book by Moore! which were of course all over the front shelves), and she pulled one copy out of the back politics section. You would think with his troubles with [this company] in the past that they would love to promote this book."

Thursday, July 01, 2004

CD Harris points out that the Minority Leader of the United States Senate decided that the Senate's work on the defense bill was less important than going to the movies. He and other democrats actually shut down Senate action on the defense bill to attend a showing of 911 pounds.

MichaelMoore has said, " "I don't agree with the copyright laws, and I don't have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it with people. As long as they're not doing it to make a profit, you know, as long as they're not trying to make a profit off my labor. I would oppose that."

Remember John Kerry's special new "misery index," the one tailor-made to show the economy getting worse during the Bush administration, since the traditional misery index (inflation plus unemployment) isn't bad at all? One of the components of the Kerry index was college tuition, which the haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat, who by the way served in Vietnam, claimed has increased 13%--"the largest increase on record."

Well, it turns out KERRY LIED!!!!, or at least didn't do his homework. USA Today reports that "what students pay on average for tuition at public universities has fallen by nearly one-third since 1998, thanks to new federal tax breaks and a massive increase in state and federal grants to most students and their families." Oh well, back to the drawing board.